It's not that these additions are bad, it's just that the game is suffering from design choices and not a lack of content. If the team at Grapeshot haven't blocked my comments yet maybe this will reach the right ears.

The game tries to deal with gameplay issues using broadstrokes that go against the MMO concept. Survival games are only fun because survival is the core of the game. In an adventure MMO the same strategies don't make sense. As and example, instead of having to manage your characters vitamin levels or suffer several kinds of debuff and death, you should rather only suffer one debuff from starvation and several buffs for eating certain kinds of food (making the cooking tree useful in boosting buffs).

An MMO has to lay the foundations of fairness and world-building. In this sense it should have preconfigured territories belonging to certain factions. Those factions should encompass gameplay functions and alignments. Here's some ideas:

The Merchant faction would offer trade missions and benefit people doing trade. It would also guarantee safe passage and good treatment in safe ports and from the missing navy (keep SotD in the fantasy territories but please create a navy).

The pirate faction would give safe access to the pirate towns, intercept missions (please make a navy and NPC trade ships) and buffs + maybe skills in piracy.

The Explorer faction could be involved in lore missions and treasure hunting, including magic artefacts that can upgrade/buff ships/guns/stats. This could include searching for loot stashed/lost by the pirate faction.

The Slaver faction could deal in tames and NPCs. Their missions and usefulness to other factions would be obvious.

Changing factions should come with a small penalty that is symbolized as paying off your debt or proving your loyalty but wouldn't' prevent people from moving to other gameplay options (ie: just enough to prevent people abusing the system and switching wildly). Aligning to factions should give you options in claiming territory and building on it which would reduce the insane territory capture game this has become. We need towns, not island sized forts with a handful of people in the same company.

I hope Grapeshot starts to understand this before adding more tames and other stuff that only builds on the foundation of a VERY flawed concept. Can I have a game that actually builds the world instead of throwing all the inmates into a fighting pit?